DAY 1 OF WEDDING TRIP TO SYDNEY

I am packed and ready to go when Shaz picks me up. I left the key up at Kaybee’s and they are just about ready as well. Its much cooler than it has been so far this year. This brings back memories of so many times and so many different situations. The Urunga to Sydney XPT. I travelled on it before it was an XPT. Damn side better it was back then. Dining carriage and sleeping cars. Then they built the current people movers saying it would be much faster. Well – the old trip was 10 hours. The new one is 8 1/2. I would prefer an extra hour or so with the added comfort.

Nonetheless I am also accustomed to this one. My ex husband was thermit welder on the tracks inthe 1980s. I have been up and down to detox and rehab. Then with my kids for holidays. Later on my adventuring between Tweed and here and Sydney.

I just haven’t done it since I met Izzy and that was 2007 and I certaibly haven’t done it since I was so ill.

OK then. Time to wind down. Pack the last of the electronics. Wait for Shaz and do some quiet meditation before I leave.

This looks like being quite an experience ahead of me. People look fowrads to such things but for me at this time – I am just achiveing a stability and sense of ongoingness and would have preferred to have more time to stabilise and increase my feelings of safety.

Its my borther’s wedding and its important to him . Therefore I honour that. Fare us all well.

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HERE IS SILVERBIRD 9: the SilverBird9

LYNNE AND IZZY

FROM VAN BADHAM Van Badham I wrote the following for his life companion, Lynne: Lynne, amidst heartbreak, be consoled that the man who was your beloved companion was no ordinary man. He was a leader, a fighter, a guru, a comrade, a friend. He was a man of independent thought and resolute moral principle. He was an artist, a maker and creator and a bard in the truest sense. Meeting Izzy as an 18 year old was the encounter that inspired the directions I took in my own life – artistic and political. He proved to me in his example that those who are as selfless as they are motivated have the power to open minds and effect change. He had the rare quality of the true champion – to understand the indivisibility of leadership and teamwork. He was good. He was kind. He shared what he learned with uninhibited generosity, he told a cracking story and he was always prepared to take the piss out of himself. He spoke truth to power. And he loved you, truly. He leaves love and good example behind him as he embarks on his next journey, and so he endures. I am thinking of how he used to treat his terrible migraines by trapping his head in a wire hanger. And it makes me think what I should have realised before hearing this today: that he appeared in my life as some kind of sage, or wizard – a Gandalf or Merlin – grey-bearded, wise to the world, stepping out from the edge of a grey forest at a crossroads, and, smiling, nudging me gently towards my true way.